The Blue Jackets pumped up their payroll by millions. They added speed and skill and said they were going to go, go, go. Playoffs? The Central Division and the Western Conference are stacked with quality teams, but the Jackets would be right in the mix as they groomed their young roster.

That was the plan, and it seemed reasonable.

This evening, the Dallas Stars visit Nationwide Arena. The Stars are 4-1-0. The Jackets are 0-4-1. Captain Rick Nash has called it a “must-win.” Game six. Must-win.

Already, coach Scott Arniel has rejiggered the roster.

Rookie forward Cam Atkinson, one of the better performers out of the gate, was farmed to Springfield last week. It was said he was not yet responsible enough in his own end. It was implied that he needed to be quarantined from the disease of losing. He was replaced by Alexandre Giroux, a longtime minor-leaguer.

Second-year forward Matt Calvert, another fleet youngster with a good wrist shot, followed Atkinson to Springfield. Calvert’s place in the Jackets lineup was given to 24-year-old tough guy Cody Bass.

Through five games, the Jackets lack definition. They were a speed team last week. They are not anymore. What are they, other than winless? What do they do well?

Granted, they have been unlucky. Their big-ticket offensive defenseman, James Wisniewski, began the season with an eight-game suspension. He could be a difference-maker on the power play, which has produced just one goal.

Jeff Carter, the ballyhooed No. 1 center, has had his surgically repaired foot dinged twice, and he has had the flu, and we’ve probably seen him close to 100 percent only once, on opening night. Forwards Kristian Huselius and Jared Boll and backup goaltender Mark Dekanich began the season on the injured list, where they remain.

But there is no explanation for the power play starting the season 0 of 20, or the spotty penalty kill, or the lack of secondary scoring. R.J. Umberger, Antoine Vermette and Derick Brassard, who together will make $10.7 million this season, have combined for zero goals and one assist. They are not doing the job, and the youngsters are not allowed to challenge them. Atkinson and Calvert are gone, and Ryan Johansen has played a total of 17 minutes, 12 seconds.

At different junctures, Arniel has claimed the team was tired, he has decried “the effort” and turned a practice into a punishment, and he has removed the conference-standings board from the locker room because it was depressing.

What we have here is a collective squeezing of the stick, by the coach and the players, and a lack of a firm direction and/or leadership. And it’s not just a five-game thing. The Jackets finished last season on a 3-12-7 jag, which means they have lost 24 of their past 27 games. In that span, they have won just once in regulation.

It is beginning to feel like it is one, long, uninterrupted streak, as if the heady summer of upgrade never happened.

After tonight’s game, the Jackets have a nasty little back-to-back this weekend, when they are on the road at Detroit and Ottawa. If they can squeeze two victories out of these three games, then 2-5-1 will not seem all that bad when Wisniewski returns for a home game against Detroit in seven days.

But if they are 1-6-1 or 0-7-1, the pressure to turn things around gets a hydraulic ratcheting. It would be time to think about shaking up the operation in a substantive way, be it in the front office, behind the bench or via trade. They cannot afford to drag their feet the way they did in 2009-10, when coach Ken Hitchcock was fired three months after things started unraveling.

With a payroll approaching $64 million, and with dwindling crowds, patience is much less an option — not if they believe in their core players, and in their youth, and in their original plan, whatever that was.

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